I used to program Coldfusion and knew nothing about ASP before (though too difficult to learn!). When I picked up this book, it's surprising easy to read. Even though it didn't cover a whole world (class & object, transaction... advanced topics) but I found that this book covers most what you need for a Pre-professional dynamic web page. It's very good for someone who knows nothing or knows a little about ASP, this is the book you must have! Highly recommended.

Every serious programmer, or at least the one who wants to become one should read this book. Book is supported with structured programming examples (Ada,C,Pascal), but the underlying principles that it is trying to present are as contemoporary as always. I started my career as a programmer. As a novice I got to work on some (other people's) pretty crappy code that kept me up very long at night, and costed me a great deal of stress. Learning from that frustrating experience I asked myself - what is a good programming, and what would it take to learn how to be a great programmer/developer.I discovered Steve McConnel's book, and it helped me a lot in getting there. It remained one of the milestones of my career.This book will teach you a lot. It will show you a bad way to code, and the good way to do it. It will give you a great coding tips, and it will show you some, as the author calls them, "coding horrors". Moreover, it will tell you some great 80/20 rules that should help you with debugging, testing and refactoring focus. It will definitely change you as a programmer - a lot. Do I need to say again that every serious programmer should read this book.The only thing that I could wish for would be a reflection on Object-Oriented programming and its good vs. bad practices.

1) This book is TRULY designed for programming beginners! In other words, you do not have to have prior programming experience in order to be able to learn from this book.

2) Each chapter provides clear, easy to understand, programming examples which are throughly thought out by the author. Due to this, it makes learning a lot of fun -- and quite entertaining!

3) The coding samples are clearly explained. For a fact, this is my first programming exposure to the .NET platform and I am rapidly learning to write neat software with this book.

4) Don't listen to the others who are giving this book a bad rating. The only truth to their statements is that this book does use (in some chapters) older, and well-known programming commands, which Microsoft would prefer went away. However, these statements are perfectly legitimate to use -- and are frequently used in software developed to this very day. Besides that, the rest of their complaint's are mostly unnecessary nit-picking...